In today's workplace, timing is everything. Improving time management in an organization or in certain groups begins with coordinating the date/time of all contacts in specified environments such as a company, a department, a team, or business partners etc., which greatly improves collaboration efforts, saves time, and saves money by increasing the information efficiency within a group.
The most commonly used time management tools for the today's computer users are Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus organizer, and Google calendar, etc. Those tools give users a structure or protocol for scheduling time, creating tasks and contacts. Those calendar tools also provide a platform for group sharing and exchange of information. With these tools a user can establish multiple private (e.g., mailbox) and public (e.g., group) folders. Using these folders, the user can create calendar appointments (e.g., public or private), create contacts, and create personal tasks.
However, many users have to copy their appointments, or transfer calendar data from one calendar to another. Those main calendar tools do not have the technical capability to synchronize with each other automatically. There is no automatic centralized calendar which would enable users to view an entire organizational calendar or business partners' calendar at a glance.
FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a graphical user interface (GULT) of a conventional calendar tool. In this example, referring to FIG. 1, user 101 is an organizer of an event. User 102 is in the same company with user 101. As a result, user 101 can see user 102's free time from user 101's calendar tools directly as shown in area 104. While user 103 is user 101's customer, user 103 uses a different calendar tool. As a result, user 101 cannot read user 103's calendar data, and cannot see user 103's free time as shown in area 105. Rather, user 101 has to call user 103 or write email to user 103 to find out user 103's free time.
In addition, with the progress of telecom and transportation techniques, the world has grown to be more of a global community. As such, business partners or customers may be distributed all over the world and located in different time zones. For example, 10:00 AM is a good time for one person to hold a meeting, but maybe its business partners or customers are out of their offices. Currently most of main calendar tools do not display the attendee's local time when scheduling a meeting or an appointment. One has to convert the time zones manually.
Further, most calendar tools provide a reminder function, which is designed to keep track and remind a user of an event before the event occurs. Usually a reminder will pop up a window on the attendee's desktop certain period of time before the event. Currently, the reminder time is fixed when an organizer or sender drafts the event.